


What Remains In The Ashes

by starkey109



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And to another character, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Not Jet, Only mentioned in passing but will still include warning, The noncon happens off screen but is very much implied, firebender jet, realistic consequences of war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:48:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27035197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkey109/pseuds/starkey109
Summary: Jet's always known what he is.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 22





	What Remains In The Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time posting a fic, though I have been involved in fandom for years. But hey! What better time to start posting then during the resurgence of the Avatar fandom? 
> 
> I became really inspired by the idea of Jet as a firebender that grew up in the Earth Kingdom with a lot of internalized self hatred so here we are. This was originally going to be the opening of a longer fic but I decided the tone and voice lended better to a drabble. I'm still going to expand the idea into a multi-chapter work but I'm going to post it seperately.
> 
> I hope you enjoy :)

He’s fought all his life, always done whatever it takes to survive no matter the cost. What else can he do? That’s the justification Jet gives himself when the girl in the forest pins him to a tree with ice she drew from her fingertips and looks at him with something like hatred. “You’re a monster,” she tells him and Jet agrees. What else can he be with this fire inside him?

His mother always knew what he was. The night he was born, kicking and screaming from her womb, she’d taken one look at him and hissed, “It looks like one of them.” She named him Jiao-Long then put a bottle to her lips and didn’t put it down until the day the Fire Nation turned her and everything else to ash. She said once that it was his eyes, the flecks of gold around his irises. Little flickers of light like the torches the ashbringers carried in their palms. He wasn’t her husband’s son. 

It wasn’t until his third winter that he began to feel his breath in the hearthfire and his heart in the sun and embers finally danced across his fingertips. His mother said nothing and that night he woke to find her hovering over his bed, a knife trembling over his stomach. She was crying. “Mom?” he said and the knife clattered to the floor. “Curse you, Jiao-Long!” she screamed, “Why do you make me love you?!” 

She didn’t come down for breakfast the next morning and The Man Who Was Not His Father told him plainly, “I told her to leave you in the forest. That’s what the other girls did with theirs. It would have been easier, but she thought she could love you. We’d been trying for years, you know. To have a child. Instead we got you.”

The girl in the forest calls him a monster and Jet agrees. He’s always known what he is.

**Author's Note:**

> I did give Jet a different birthname as I figured Jet probably isn't his real name lol. I chose Jiao-Long which means "looks like a dragon." I meant for it to be given to him by his mother as an insult - implying that he looks like a firebender.
> 
> If you read this far, thank you :)


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